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Announcement of a Foxconn Factory to be built in Wisconsin
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.
At one thirty in the morning on election night in 2016, the networks called Wisconsin, awarding Donald Trump the state’s ten electoral college votes and pushing him past the 270-vote threshold needed to win the White House. Wisconsin had just elevated Trump to the presidency. “Wisconsin! Wisconsin. Wisconsin was barely in play!” Megyn Kelly said on Fox News. On CNN, Jake Tapper called the result “stunning.”
While Trump’s victory may have shocked the media, it merely heralded the final stage of Wisconsin’s dramatic transformation from a pioneering beacon of progressive, democratic politics to the embodiment of that legacy’s national unraveling. Powerful conservative donors and organizations across the country had Wisconsin in their sights years before the 2016 election, helping Governor Scott Walker and his allies systematically change the state’s political culture.
Wisconsin’s history made it an especially attractive and important target. In the early twentieth century, icons like the populist senator and governor Robert La Follette, who was known as Fighting Bob, and movements like Milwaukee’s pragmatic “sewer socialism” forged an enduring progressive tradition. La Follette instituted numerous reforms—direct primaries, banning corporate donations to political candidates, and civil-service protections.
“Democracy is a life, and involves continual struggle,” La Follette wrote in his autobiography. “It is only as those of every generation who love democracy resist with all their might encroachments of its enemies that the ideals of representative government can even be nearly approximated.”
Throughout the twentieth century, Wisconsin led the country in devising pioneering legislation that aided the vast majority of its citizens. In 1911, the state legislature established the nation’s first workers’ compensation program, a progressive state income tax, and more stringent child-labor laws. The following year, former President Theodore Roosevelt described Wisconsin as a “laboratory for wise, experimental legislation aiming to secure the social and political betterment of the people as a whole.”
Wisconsin has gone from being a “laboratory of democracy” to a testing ground for national conservatives bent on remaking American politics.
The state’s progressive spirit continued for generations, influencing the entire country: Wisconsin created the first unemployment-insurance program and was the first state to recognize collective bargaining rights for municipal employees. Indeed, much of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, including the Social Security Act, was drafted by Wisconsinites loyal to what is called the Wisconsin Idea, an ethos that placed a moral obligation on the University of Wisconsin to serve the citizens of the state.
More broadly, the Wisconsin Idea encouraged legislation, informed by the expertise of the university’s faculty, aimed at creating a more equitable society. Its humanistic reach extended to Great Society programs like Medicare, designed by another Wisconsinite under its sway decades later. More than any other state, Wisconsin embodied Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’s hope that states might become “laboratories of democracy.”
But in recent years, Wisconsin has gone from being a widely admired “laboratory of democracy” to a testing ground for national conservatives bent on remaking American politics. Its century-old progressive legacy has been dismantled in virtually every area: labor rights, environmental protection, voting rights, government transparency.
By the time Speaker of the House Paul Ryan declared in April that he would be returning home to Janesville rather than running for reelection, Wisconsin had experienced one of the largest declines of the middle class of any state in the country. Its poverty rate had climbed to a thirty-year high; the state’s roads were the second worst in the country; the University of Wisconsin–Madison had fallen, for the first time, out of the rankings of the country’s top five research schools. A study estimated that 11 percent of the state’s population was deterred from voting in the 2016 presidential election by Wisconsin’s new voter ID law, one of the strictest in the nation.
Wisconsin’s precipitous fall should concern every American, not just the state’s residents. After all, Wisconsin once had what any pragmatic citizen might admire, even covet: clean air and water, transparent government, good public schools, a world-class state university, and a strong tradition of supporting labor rights. Precisely because of those attributes, Wisconsin became a target for national conservatives. As Scott Walker boasted in his memoir, if he could change Wisconsin, he and his allies could “do it anywhere.”
Robert La Follette was born on his family’s farm twenty miles south of Madison, in 1855. Growing up, he was deeply influenced by the Grange, an agrarian populist movement that swept the Midwest. “As a boy on the farm in Primrose Township I heard and felt this movement of the Grangers swirling about me,” La Follette wrote. “I felt the indignation which it expressed in such a way that I suppose I have never fully lost the effect of that early impression.”
The chief justice of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, Edward Ryan, also made a deep impression. In 1873, La Follette, then eighteen, heard Ryan give a commencement speech to the graduating class of the University of Wisconsin Law School. “There is looming up a new and dark power,” Ryan told them. “The accumulation of individual wealth seems to be greater than it ever has been since the downfall of the Roman Empire. The enterprises of the country are aggregating vast corporate combinations of unexampled capital, boldly marching, not for economic conquests only, but for political power.” His talk issued a chilling warning that marked La Follette forever.
“The question will arise and arise in your day, though perhaps not fully in mine,” Ryan said. “Which shall rule—wealth or man; which shall lead—money or intellect; who shall fill public stations—educated and patriotic freemen, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?”
In the ensuing years, La Follette would become the most influential political figure in Wisconsin’s history, serving its citizens as a Republican district attorney, congressman, governor, and senator—a tempestuous conduit and catalyst for the Progressive era. In 1909 he founded a publication called La Follette’s Weekly, which later became The Progressive.
Throughout his thirty-four years in office, Fighting Bob was driven by an uncompromising moral vision: The purpose of government, he believed, was to alleviate economic suffering, foster equality, and encourage active citizenship to preserve American democracy. As he put it in an 1897 address in the small mining town of Mineral Point to open one of his campaigns for governor, “The basic principle of this government is the will of the people.” And he recognized the emerging threat from corporate wealth and power.
“Since the birth of the Republic, indeed almost within the last generation, a new and powerful factor has taken its place in our business, financial, and political world and is there exercising a tremendous influence,” La Follette said. “The existence of the corporation, as we have it with us today, was never dreamed of by the [founding] fathers. The corporation of today has invaded every department of business, and its powerful but invisible hand is felt in almost all activities of life.”
Fighting Bob La Follette was driven by an uncompromising moral vision: The purpose of government, he believed, was to alleviate economic suffering.
La Follette closed by imploring the audience not to give up. “Think of the heroes who died to make this country free,” he said. “Shall we, their children, basely surrender our birthright and say: ‘Representative government is a failure?’ No, never, until Bunker Hill and Little Round Top, sink into the very earth.”
La Follette’s class-based message forged an impregnable rural-urban political coalition; in his 1910 re-election to the United States Senate, he won an astonishing 78 percent of the statewide vote and all but one of Wisconsin’s then seventy-one counties. That victory set the stage for the apotheosis of Wisconsin progressivism: the 1911 legislature, memorably described by Frederic Howe, an Ohio politician, in his book Wisconsin: An Experiment in Democracy. Progressives, Howe wrote, had transformed the state into “an experiment station in politics, in social and industrial legislation, in the democratization of science and higher education.”
La Follette ran for President in 1924 on his own Progressive Party ticket, capturing his home state and 17 percent of the national vote. A measure of his influence can be seen in the fifty thousand people who came to pay their respects after his death one year later, when his body lay in rest at the state capitol, and in the condolences to his family from President Calvin Coolidge, Eugene Debs, William Randolph Hearst, and William Jennings Bryan.
Robert M. “Fighting Bob” La Follette Sr.
In 1929, the sculptor Jo Davidson created a life-size statue of La Follette for National Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol, one of only two Wisconsinites honored there. Davidson also completed a bust of La Follette, a copy of which was purchased in 1977 by the state of Wisconsin and sits in the east wing of the state capitol. It became a tradition for every Wisconsin governor, Republican and Democrat alike, to be sworn in next to La Follette’s bust.
That tradition was broken in 2011, when Scott Walker was sworn in. Walker chose to stage his ceremony in the capitol’s north wing. There, a reporter noted, many of the attendees would have to turn their backs to the bust of Fighting Bob.
On February 11, 2011, Walker held a press conference in the Wisconsin state capitol, where he unveiled what he called a “budget repair bill,” which later became known as Act 10.
Wisconsin, Walker said, was in the throes of an economic and fiscal crisis. Sacrifice was needed. To avoid layoffs, furloughs, and children forced from the Medicaid rolls, public workers would be required to contribute one half of the amount of their pensions and double the amount they had been paying towards their health care premiums. This drop in take-home pay would soon be estimated to approach $1 billion a year.
Walker eventually arrived at the bill’s distinguishing feature: the gutting of collective bargaining. The process, which allows workers to have a unified voice in the conditions of their employment, would now be permitted only for wages, and then only for pay raises capped by the rate of inflation. No longer would public-sector unions have the right to address workplace safety, grievances, health care, or benefits. Union dues would be voluntary. The law required that union members vote to recertify their unions every year, and to win recertification they would need a majority of the entire bargaining unit, not just the workers voting.
Despite his hostility to unions, Walker had not campaigned on making radical changes to labor relations. But eliminating collective bargaining rights may have always been central to his plans. Two weeks after he was sworn in, in a private exchange captured by a documentary filmmaker, a billionaire donor to Walker’s campaign named Diane Hendricks asked Walker if there was “any chance we’ll ever get to be a completely red state, and work on these unions.” Walker assured her that Wisconsin would change.
Hendricks then asked if Wisconsin would ever become a “right-to-work” state. Walker responded enthusiastically. “The first step is, we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public-employee unions,” he said, “because you use divide-and-conquer.”
Walker had not campaigned on making radical changes to labor relations. But eliminating collective bargaining rights may have always been central to his plans.
Act 10 was supposed to fix persistent budget shortfalls by making public employees pay more for benefits and all but eliminating collective bargaining rights, and when Walker announced it at the capitol, he repeatedly described its impact as “modest.” Privately, Walker saw it differently. In a widely publicized prank phone call with a blogger impersonating David Koch, Walker described the dinner he held for his cabinet at his executive residence the night before his announcement.
“It was kind of the last hurrah, before we dropped the bomb,” he told the faux Koch. At the dinner, Walker had held up a photograph of Ronald Reagan and told his Cabinet that what they were about to do recalled Reagan’s historic breaking of the air traffic controllers’ union strike in 1981. Walker singled out the firing of the controllers as “one of the most defining moments” of Reagan’s political career—a moment, he said, that “was the first crack in the Berlin Wall.”
Walker saw Act 10 in a similar light. “This is our time to change the course of history,” he said.
A red-winged blackbird darted across the windshield as I parked in front of Robert La Follette’s childhood home in Argyle, a village of 850 people twenty miles from the Illinois border. In 2000, a group of civic-minded residents formed Historic Argyle, a local nonprofit, to save La Follette’s crumbling home.
Fifteen years later, with the house largely restored, celebrants marked the 160th anniversary of La Follette’s birth with the first “La Follette Days,” a chautauqua celebrating Wisconsin’s Progressive lion. Near a stage straddled by a Wisconsin flag on one end and an American flag on the other, neighbors caught up with one another, drinking beer in the late afternoon sun and waiting for a talk by Jim Leary, a folklorist at the University of Wisconsin.
After Leary’s talk, the High Street Revelers, an old-time string band from Mineral Point, prepared to take the stage. Kristine O’Connor drank a beer in the backyard. O’Connor, a founding member of Historic Argyle, worked on the La Follette renovation, stripping century-old paint off the house with her husband.
“If you walk down Main Street, you’ll run into people who don’t know La Follette even lived here,” she said. “That’s the main reason why we opened this up again. Because what he stood for was just—he was for the common person.” O’Connor equally admired Belle La Follette, Bob’s wife and the first woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin Law School. She particularly liked how, when Bob and Belle married, in 1881, Belle made the Unitarian minister take the word “obey” out of their vows.
“To tell you the truth, I didn’t know about Bob La Follette either, until I joined Historic Argyle,” O’Connor admitted. She had joined only because she thought a tourist attraction might help her struggling town. “But the more I read about him, the more I thought, ‘Gosh, we need him now.’ ”
For many years, O’Connor worked at a local bank on Main Street, where she approved personal loans. Lafayette County is one of the poorer counties in Wisconsin. “Divorces and medical bills,” she said. “Those are the two things that can just destroy a family.” O’Connor watched helplessly as Argyle grew depleted. “The area used to be full of family dairy farms, and most of them have died out,” she said. “We’ve got big corporate farms around here. Some people lost their farms. As farmers got older, the majority of them just sold out, and the younger generation doesn’t want a 24/7 day job.”
I returned to La Follette’s boyhood home a few months later, as a chill set in and the sugar-maple leaves turned to yellow and orange. As I crossed the road to the front entrance, Kristine O’Connor’s husband, Donald “Doc” O’Connor, clambered out of a red pickup truck. Wearing a University of Wisconsin Badgers sweatshirt, Doc, a retired veterinarian, introduced himself with a handshake and a smile that revealed teeth stained yellow-black from years of chewing tobacco. He walked me to a small cottage, where Kristine was waiting for us. She handed me a cup of coffee she had brought from the local gas station, one of the few businesses still open in the area.
“Argyle used to have four or five grocery stores, two car dealerships, a dry cleaners, and a hardware store,” she said. All of those are gone now, except one grocery store. South Wayne, eleven miles south, where Doc grew up, was more destitute.
“It’s almost a ghost town,” Kristine said, as the three of us settled into beat-up wooden chairs. Doc had recently watched an 8-mm film his mother shot of Main Street in South Wayne in the late 1950s. “My dad was coming out of the restaurant in town with his cup of coffee,” Doc said. “The film is only a minute long, and I must have counted fifteen cars going up and down. There were twenty-seven businesses then. There are now two taverns, one gas station, and one small restaurant—that’s it.”
After twelve years of working seven days a week, Doc burned out and closed his practice to take a job with the state as an animal epidemiologist. Doc began commuting to Madison. Around the same time, the family farms Doc used to service began vanishing at an alarming rate. The farm input costs kept rising, and the profits from sales were too low. “They were working twelve-to-fifteen-hour days for maybe a dollar, a dollar and a half an hour,” he said.
Like many state workers, shortly after the passage of Act 10, Doc decided to retire early. “I got to look and figured it out with the gas and an increase in my medical and retirement, I would be making $1,700 more a month sitting at home than if I was still working,” he said. Though he made 70 percent of what he would have made in the private sector, he often heard complaints about the state paying for health care for public employees.
‘Everybody I talked to that voted for Trump now has nothing good to say about him at all.’
I asked Kristine and Doc to show me South Wayne. On the way, Kristine pointed to the enormous six-bedroom Victorian house where she grew up, which her parents and grandmother bought in 1960 for $9,000. We passed a country graveyard and continued along back roads for several miles until we reached Doc’s hometown. I pulled into a parking stall next to his truck. The street was desolate. Not a single car drove by. There was a meat processor still in business up the street and a deserted bar and restaurant on the corner. Doc pointed to his dad’s old office, remembering the film his mom had shot.
“Every one of these parking stalls here was full,” he said, shaking his head. He stared at an empty lot up the street. “That used to be a drugstore,” he said. “That’s where his dad would go to buy Christmas presents,” Kristine said.
I said goodbye to Doc and Kristine and walked up Main Street. On the corner was a shuttered junk store with a “For Sale” sign next to a notice for an upcoming auction of the store’s goods. Inside the dust-covered window, a carousel pony lay beneath photographs showing handguns and shotguns that would be auctioned. The shop reminded me of the resentment coursing through Wisconsin, and something Doc had said back at La Follette’s house.
“Everybody I talked to that voted for Trump now has nothing good to say about him at all,” he told me. “They think he’s a nutcase. But they think Walker walks on water, because he got rid of all those public-employee unions who were getting all that free money, all that big retirement money.”
Staring at that “For Sale” sign on that forlorn street, I knew it was hubris to try and pinpoint the exact source of resentment that had propelled Act 10 and Donald Trump’s Wisconsin victory. Just as I knew those events could never be isolated from the desolation of places like South Wayne.
Dan Kaufman of Brooklyn, New York, is a Wisconsin native whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker.
Excerpted with permission from The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics, by Dan Kaufman, published by W.W. Norton and Company.